What is the use of poetry in the midst of slaughter? The history of both is lengthy and intertwined. In one poem of his collection Sand Opera, Philip Metres evokes the death of Sarpedon in the Iliad, its violence done on a landscape close to the one of Iraq today, where “still the war continues, though it takes other names.” And each of the poems in this collection is an exercise in naming.

Over and over, the words struggle against the black bars of the censor's marker, even in fragments of the Old Testament interspersed throughout the series of poems all entitled (echo/ex), which range in reference from a mutilated Creation account, to a sacrifice of Isaac in which the child is not saved, to a page of empty quotation marks and brackets. This is poetry excised, where we labor to restore the missing lines and the lost voices.

The book begins in martyrdom, with St. Bartholomew flayed, like the prisoners in CIA cells who have a book of suffering written upon their bodies. Transparent pages, which might be samples from a volume in Jorge Luis Borges' imaginary library, are overlaid with the floor plans of interrogation rooms and prisons. And we hear the voice of an Abu Ghraib guard saying that “The Christian in me knows it's wrong” followed by the terrifying conjunction, “but...”

Metres fashions a web of reference which is always precisely relevant, ranging from the artist Daniel Heyman’s portraits of Iraqi prisoners, giving faces back to those from whom the torturers took them, to a poem by Caroline Forché describing a Salvadoran death squad commander and his collection of human ears. “This world is centaur,” Metres writes, “half daydream, half nightmare.” But worse, we live with a general confusion as to which is which.

The few moments of clarity that might be managed are fragile at best, and only rarely encouraging. In Stanley Kubrick’s film, Paths of Glory, whena condemned soldier is dismayed that a cockroach at his feet will still be alive after he is executed, a fellow prisoner crushes the insect in a gesture of dismal consolation. In moving contrast, Metres finds the possibility of a salvaged humanity in a similar situation. While the prisoner in his poem Black Site (Exhibit I) rejoices over the company of a fly, he nonetheless hopes that it will make its way “under the door / so it would not be / imprisoned itself.”

This escape from self-interest glows in a world of endless war, where all of us are damaged veterans. This possibility is one that not all Americans have the conscience to consider, but the consequences of our refusal to accept responsibility for the horrors undertaken on our behalf continue to mark the time. 'There’s no place a grain of sand cannot hide,” the poet reminds us, and we carry darkness from place to place across the landscapes of memory, where the living assert themselves with “thoughts of thighs at a funeral.”

The poet's uncertainty about what will strike home amidst what he carefully describes as “the daily shipwreck of news,” leaves him no choice but to extend the reach of the imagination into the war, and our shared capacity for violence. Out of that, he sings. This is the central paradox of a culture in which a death camp commandant listens to Beethoven.

But the music, in the end, is our only hope. In this collection's final poem, “Compline,” a suppliant voice cries out “My God, my God, open the spine binding our sight.” One answer to that prayer is this book.

Poetry was in everything that Daniel Berrigan did, and not only in his writing. He knew from the Old Testament prophets– Isaiah, of course, but also the less familiar, fierce voices of Daniel, Hosea, Micah, none of them “minor” in their demands or their fidelity – that metaphors were another way to change the world, and that even voices of condemnation needed music to make the conscience turn and listen.

The Catonsville 9 Statement, with its chill irony of apology for “the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house,” was written to take the place of an original draft that Berrigan found wanting. It was not enough to do the action, it was essential to make the words fit the doing.

He was in one respect a selfish man, as the Golden Rule is selfish, using the treatment we expect for ourselves as the measure of how others are treated. And, like Thoreau, he broke the law, first of all, to disassociate himself from murder in the name of the state. He would have called this, as required by his Catholic faith, acting to save his soul.

Darkness was familiar to him; he made no secret of this. And he lived in a time, as we do, that hope is not easy. But that never kept him from doing what was required.

We exchanged poems from time to time and he was always more generous in praise of mine than they deserved. But to be told that there were words he found in them that mattered was the kind of wild grace he granted to everyone he touched through all his days.

And he wrote his own best elegy, as one would expect:

The poem called deathis unwritten yet. Some day will showthe violent last line,the shadow rise, a bird of omen

snatch me for its ghost.And a hand somewhere, purposeful as God’sclose like two eyes, this book.

This is the scene that tells everything. The soldier is visible only from the chest down, wearing shorts, sneakers, and no socks. He is firing an automatic weapon. The spent bullet casings are falling around his feet , except for one that slides down his leg and into his shoe. For a brief moment, nothing more happens, but you know what is coming. Suddenly the man reaches down to pull the sneaker off and flip the piece of burning metal out of it. Such a small, absurd wound hardly seems to matter in the midst of the larger violence surrounding it. Yet this documentary ends up revealing that nothing of what happened in this place matters much more than that. My father rarely speaks of what his experience of war was like, but he did once recall that, as he came ashore on Omaha Beach in 1944, what went through his mind was the question "What am I doing here?" Such a thought would certainly have been familiar to the young, armed, American men who flew some two years ago into the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan for the first time. This was their nowhere that they had landed in the middle of. Everywhere there are steep blades of rock telling the new arrivals that they have come to a place where they do not belong, a landscape that forgives nothing, and which would soon be marked with the names of their dead.

The title of the film is one of those, although a soldier describes the outpost that shares the name as "just a shitty place" that is nothing like the man whose memorial it was meant to be. The faces of those who will die, or be hurt, come and go on the screen, with no way to anticipate what will happen, or to warn them. We sit in the theater being offered griefs we would otherwise never know, and which we are likely to refuse, as did the young man who, after seeing his friend's corpse on a hillside, "wanted to cry, but didn't..." None of the men men who give witness in this film have anything to say about foreign policy. They are fighting private wars, defending companions of necessity rather than choice. And they find satisfactions in fantasies that mirror their reality, playing shooter video games just before combat. The preparation they have had from the culture in this country is more thorough and ordinary that we like to think. In a conversation about his home, one soldier describes his family's ranch that in a way that fits none of the stereotypes which his companion expects but is, rather, "a whole bunch of land that you kill things on." He then pauses, and says, "like here."

“You can’t get a better high,” says one soldier, matter-of-factly. “It’s like crack, you know. Once you’ve been shot at you really can’t come down, you can’t top that." In the book entitled War which Sebastian Junger, one of the film’s director’s, wrote about his experience in Afghanistan, much more is made about the addiction that comes from this legitimized violence, not very different from the world that Michael Herr in his writing about the Vietnam war described as like the feeling of undressing a woman for the first time. This overwhelming attraction of being always at full pitch was the reason why the philosopher William James, writing at the very beginning of a slaughterous twentieth century , desperately hoped to find something he called "the moral equivalent of war" where the same thrill and camaraderie would leave its participants unharmed. But the young man who can’t come down knows of no such alternative. "How are you going to go back into the civilian world then?” asks an interviewer. “I have no idea,” says the young man.

As telling as this film is, what difference will it make? How many of the few people who will see it will not enter the theatre already convinced that these wars should end? How many more testimonies will we have about war making that are “unforgettable” or “deeply moving” (as some other reviews have styled this film), yet still useless in bringing an end to it? If All Quiet on the Western Front orCatch-22 or Born on the Fourth of July have changed nothing, why will this? We are left instead with numerous young men and women like the one interviewed here after his return home from Afghanistan who declares that "I prefer not to sleep and not dream about it..." But he will.

Out of the Slaughterhouse:a remembrance of Kurt Vonnegut

[published April, 2007, Hartford Catholic Worker]

It was the week before Kurt Vonnegut died that I looked at my father and saw that he was old. What does it mean that they were contemporaries? Their present was always the same because their past was – innocents caught up in that now long ago war (“the children’s crusade” as one of Vonnegut’s subtitles described it) – seeing things that were beyond believing, and which later filled their dreams. In all that I read of Vonnegut’s work – especially Slaughter-House Five, but also marking the rest of what he wrote – it was clear that living with his survival was a nearly impossible task. The litany of “so it goes” always had something desperate about it. Ironic, certainly, but also hopeless. Vonnegut had escaped the fires of Dresden, but it was no unmitigated gift. He could testify to the horrors, personify the rant of conscience in a world trained to indifference, but never succeed in soothing his own soul.

He did offer the rest of us the vision of the bombing runs in reverse, the planes flying backwards and the weapons disassembled into their component minerals which were then hidden in the ground where “they would never hurt anybody ever again.” But the compound wars which followed his – one after the other down to Iraq and Afghanistan today – rendered that hope a painful fantasy.

There was one evening when I was in the same room as he was, but I made no attempt to speak to him. I didn’t know what I could thank him for, nor could I think of any consolation to offer. There is a passage in Slaughter-House Five which points out that “every so often, for no apparent reason” the central character – Billy Pilgrim – “would find himself weeping.” I am convinced that Vonnegut himself was nearly always in tears, even while the rest of us only heard the angry laughter.

Dying, Forgetting[published June, 2004, Hartford Catholic Worker ]

Taking their instructions from the movies that defined him all his life, commentators on Ronald Reagan’s death have agreed that “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”Illusion was all that ever mattered to Reagan.He understood that one required useful lies when carrying out murderous policies; he was a smiling criminal, always.

David Dellinger smiled, too, but his was the smile of undiminished hope in the face of the injustice and violence he resisted throughout his life. I met him only once, in a basement room in Washington, D.C. The friend who introduced me mentioned some small accomplishment of mine, and Dellinger was immediately delighted in praise, as if I had been his companion in the struggle from the beginning. There was that sense of embrace about him that many others have reported; an easy grace that stole nothing from the intensity of his convictions. He was a Yale alumnus with a difference, his history reassuring other graduates (including me) that their consciences could indeed escape intact from that training ground for convivial assassins.

The fearful thing about Reagan’s popularity is that people largely knew the truth about him, yet celebrated his deceptions because they shared them. His racism, his hatred of labor, his homophobia, his spitefulness towards the poor, were perfectly mirrored in the society that elected him, and that surrounds him with cacophonies of grief now.

David Dellinger’s death registered within a smaller circle, but he was not the end of a tradition. Some of the federal prison buildings at Danbury are ones that he knew when he served a sentence there for his conscientious objection during the Second World War. There are new prisoners of conscience being confined in that bleak place now; their witness the only memorial that Dellinger and others like him ever desired

In the end, we knew more of these two dead men than they knew of themselves.Their own memories were erased by the same illness, leaving a history rewritten to mythologize one and forget the other. If that is not to be final, then we must take on a responsibility like the one that W.H. Auden once reminded us of. In both cases,

What he was, he was:What he is fated to becomeDepends on us.

A Choice of Passions

[published April, 2004, The Catholic Worker]

The part that got me was, there was a lady sitting next to me that cried all through the goddam picture. The phonier it got, the more she cried. You'd have thought she did it because she was kindhearted as hell, but I was sitting right next to her, and she wasn't.

- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

In the photograph, only the torso of the body lying in the street is visible, hands bound, a strand of rope stretched tight from the wrists to a point outside the frame. The fingers are pasted with clay, as if some murderous artist had taken an impression for an anatomical study. A crowd, headless from the cropping of the image, lines the background. Other corpses, of course, are to be found in Haiti on this day, although the newspaper shows only this one. For most readers, this would merit a glance and a turning of the page. But there is more of Christ's Passion in this image than in the entire two hours of the recent film which claims the title.

The distortion of the Mel Gibson version is not in its graphic suffering - a truth that the Christian tradition largely suppresses - but that Jesus' experience is presented as unique. Torture was not unusual then; it is not unusual now. The terrible gift of the incarnation was that God became human to experience pain as we do, so that we could see our face in God's. This was not some struggle of an epic hero to endure all things. Indeed, the film portrays Christ as inviting the flagellation to be intensified so as to confirm his divinity. The violence is so grotesquely extreme that, in the end, it leaves us unable to imagine that Jesus is doing anything but miming the pain. A human being would have found it unendurable, but the film will not show Christ in that shape. Pilate's "Ecce homo!" is made to sound like a lie. But we should hear it as "Look, only a man."

Beneath all the spurious authenticity of language and costume lies a fidelity to ancient heresies - Gibson takes the Docetist position that Jesus appears to be human, but is only playing out a masquerade. Ignorant of the trick, and with her son's blood on her face, it is Mary's suffering that is real - in the end, the story is not about Jesus at all. Unjustified by scripture, this Mary is portrayed as omnipresent, a witness to every horror perpetrated upon her son. The mother's loss is everything; his is nothing. The exquisite image of the pieta is the triumph; the resurrection an afterthought.

This is a complement to Gibson’s defining heresy – the newly familiar Manichean landscape of contemporary American political life.. The film defines its absolutes of good and evil as a struggle between a death-pale female Satan and Christ’s mother walking across from each other along the Via Crucis, eyes locked, matched sets of opposites. The woman from hell births snakes and carries a malformed infant, hairy and scarred across its back in a parody of the whipping that is taking place at the moment it appears on the screen.

This demonization of children is a recurring image of the film, twisting Jesus’ injunction to “become like little children” into an invitation to vindictive violence. Judas is tormented to suicide by a mob of ravenous adolescents who would not be out of place as the young cannibals of Tennessee Williams’ play Suddenly Last Summer.

As for Judas himself, he is used as another opportunity for denying the humanity of the story. How one longs for a depiction of betrayal that is not telegraphed by wild-eyed frenzy, a traitor by nature. There is no ordinary man here who you could not have singled out from among those seated around the seder table.

But stereotypes abound in this film, as much recent comment has noted, especially in regard to its anti-Semitism. But that particular distortion is not a simple matter of the depiction of Jewish complicity in Jesus’ death. Rather, it is contained in the refusal to consider the understandable reasons why some members of that community would have demanded his execution. The argument “It is better that one man should die...”is a reminder of a terrorized society living under occupation, fearful of provoking further repression. There is no justification for portraying Caiaphas, the High Priest, threatening revolt as a way of blackmailing Pilate into pronouncing a capital sentence. Given his position as a collaborator attempting to provide for the preservation of his community, dissent was hardly an option, any more than it is for the Iraqi governing council of today.

Granted all these distortions, in the end it is the negation of Jesus’ message of peace that is the most telling. He stops Peter from using a sword, merely pragmatic advice to one being held down by a circle of armed men. The pause is used as an occasion for a extended miraculous healing rather than a critique of violence. And he still retains the murderous children – along with a vengeful raven to pluck the eyes from an unrepentant thief. We look in vain for the gospel of love here.

Yet for all its graphic violence, there are limits to what Gibson is willing to show of the crucifixion. There is no display of Christ stripped naked; the hero can be tortured, but not humiliated. No place here for King Lear’s discovery of the “poor, bare, fork’d animal” which would confirm the corpse as human. We are led to a pristine Golgotha as if for its first and last use; not to what was a killing ground, blood-soaked, with the memory of death thick around it.And it would not be abandoned after Jesus’ body was removed. The film promotes the fantasy of suffering brought to an end; a useful blindness meant to leave us in tears at the sight of the cross, but blind to the dead in our own streets.

More Lies from a Machine: Revisiting the Enola Gay

[published January, 2004]But I have wordsThat would be howled out in the desert air,Where hearing should not latch them. – Macbeth , IV, iii Crowded in the vast museum hangar, a war toy now, the Enola Gay is once againintact. The weapon proved restorable, but not the world it destroyed. This is anexample of those ironies which, along with violence, are our culture’s most notableproducts. But what protest is adequate to the outrage? Eight years ago, when a part of the Enola Gay’s fuselage was first displayed at the Airand Space Museum in Washington, three of us marked it with blood and ashes, part ofthe history of resistance to the exhibit which has been lost in the same way the plane’shistory has been erased by the Smithsonian curators. For a brief moment, the plane was like one of those legendary sites of murder whichooze the evidence of the crimes committed there. Now the plane has been once again washed clean, and the academics have gathered tobeg for words, demanding that a more complete history of the plane’s use be includedin a display which now praises it as merely a triumph of technology. But what printed narrative would be complete? What list of the dead? How account forthe mutilated conscience of a man like the one for whose mother the plane is namedand who, when asked his opinion of the more contemporary demands for the use ofnuclear weapons, replied:“Oh, I wouldn't hesitate if I had the choice.” How will the Hibakusha present at the opening of this new museum console the deadwith their message that they have seen the distant machine a second time, nowdisplayed as near and wonderful? A possible answer would be to drag the plane into the desert to be scoured by sand to ametal skeleton, puzzled over by wandering naturalists, and explained by no documentsother than the screaming of ghosts.

The vocabulary of "ground zero" is a misnomer as applied to the site of the World Trade Center. Sixteen acres of ruin register as dramatic enough from a human perspective, coupled to the statistics of death and trauma which ripple endlessly from it. But those familiar with the reality of Trident recognize the need for more substantial geographical scales to measure the effects of nuclear weapons. For all its horror, this was a miniature of destruction, a fragment of the apocalypse.

Yet it is not in a comparison of physical effects that the incomprehensibility of Trident has its greatest resonance. Clearly the protocols of emergency response were revealed to be largely inadequate for the damage that the city of New York suffered. Specialized fire and rescue units were almost entirely decimated; communications and transportation massively disfigured; commuters of the morning became the refugees of the afternoon. The implications here are clear enough as soon as one posits the use of a single 475 kiloton warhead.

But it is in the definitions of terrorism that the terrible gift of September 11 is most obvious. We are now freed from the limits of our fantasies in imagining the dimensions of chronic fear. Trident has always been the essence of terror, holding as it does all creation at risk. Our defense against it was to render it abstract, unthinkable. But we are now faced with the paradox of judging the lesser terror of a suicidal crime as being unacceptable, while the immeasurably greater threat of Trident remains to be tolerated, even celebrated, as a source of our illusory security.

Anthrax is Trident in an envelope, at least in regard to the sense of instability it produces. Like the box cutters of the hijackers, the ordinary turns fatal in a single moment. There are no limits to the fragility of things, memories as well as lives. What does the archivist live for when there will be no one to read the documents she preserves? And how does one register a death toll when almost all the bodies have vanished? There is a yearning to see the corpses lining a morgue, an assurance of their reality, a justification for our madness.

Trident will not allow for posted lists of the missing or the grief of survivors. There is a warning in the dimensions of sorrow that last month's events created. A nuclear holocaust will erase even that painful trace of human response. There will be no occasion for distant sympathy or condolences or charity. An actual ground zero by definition renders all things void.

How are we left, then? As our society evolves into an Orwellian state of permanent war for which there are no announced boundaries, we accumulate further justifications for resistance to Trident as both machine and perception. The weapon has already done its work. What remains is to reconstruct a human community in which all terror is abjured, whatever its source. If not, we risk realizing T.S. Eliot's prediction of the world's whimpering end. No bang will be necessary.

Lies of the Past, Myths of the Present

[published November, 2000, Hartford Catholic Worker]

...like one who having into truth,by telling of it, made such a sinnerof his memory to credit his own lie...”

– The Tempest, I, ii

When then President George Bush announced that the mechanical slaughter of the Persian Gulf War signaled the end of the “Vietnam syndrome,” he was depending upon a distortion of the past treasured by American society. And he was confirming a desperate need for a myth of justification for massive violence which had constantly revised, and ultimately confusing, purposes. In his book, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam, Jerry Lembecke unpacks this distortion and traces its roots to the manipulation of dissent during the Nixon presidency, arguing that fictions like it are crucial preconditions leading to the abuse of state power.

In the Persian Gulf, the soldiers making war became the reason for the war – the means equated with the ends. This created the paradox of protests which attempted to oppose a murderous policy while at the same time avowing support for the troops who were carrying it out – a distinction that left the dissent powerless. Protest became tantamount to betrayal, because the welfare of the allied combatants – and nothing else – was at stake. The “armed propaganda” mounted by the government at that time (and uncritically abetted by the media) vowed that there would never be a repetition of the abuse – even to the point of being spat upon – that Vietnam veterans had allegedly received. The tragedy of Vietnam was thereby reduced to this – the public humiliation of those who had helped to create it. And the restoration of honor was equated with the refusal to accept any criticism of American involvement in the war against Iraq.

The image of vengeful activists spitting upon soldiers returning from Vietnam is the problem at the center of Lembcke’s analysis. How can one explain the generally unquestioned belief in a phenomenon for which Lembcke can find no credible documentary evidence? To the contrary, he wants to argue that soldiers in Vietnam, at least in the early years of the war, felt allied to the peace movement, and supported by it. His largely anecdotal evidence may raise questions as to whether G.I. opposition was actually as broadly based, at the beginning, as he assumes. But it is clear that by 1971, dismay over the conflict within the ranks often (though not always) led to acts of resistance and/or escape, as revealed by the growing numbers of troops listed as AWOL or deserters.

It is also clear that the activities of organizations like Vets for Peace (founded in late 1965), and Vietnam Veterans Against the War (organized in the spring of 1967), were the cause of special outrage for successive political administrations of this period. By the time that Richard Nixon took office, a strategy to associate the protesters with the “enemy,” and to sever their connections with military veterans, was being put into place. The twisted rhetoric of Vice-President Spiro Agnew was the most public evidence of this effort, with his characterization of those who actively opposed the war as “an effete corps of impudent snobs” self-consciously playing on the homophobia and anti-intellectualism of American society. At the same time, the war was redefined as a test of loyalty to the troops fighting it, particularly those taken prisoner. Veterans of previous conflicts, especially World War II, were enlisted to counter anti-war feeling, using earlier myths of justification to underwrite newer ones.

The accumulating testimony, especially in the “Winter Soldier” hearings, of individuals who had perpetrated atrocities during their service in Vietnam, obviously needed to be neutralized. This effort took the form of shifting the issue from one of politics, to a question of psychological dysfunction. As the inevitability of the war being lost became clearer, a focus of blame was required. Dissident veterans were redefined as victims, not of the war itself, but of their abandonment by public opinion. Traumatized by the lack of traditional justifications for the horrors which they had created and witnessed, the political protests by Vietnam vets were redefined as pathology. Disdained, spat upon, by the citizens they were the servants of, many returning soldiers descended into the madness of revolting against their own country.

At the same time, other former members of the military, many of whom had not seen actual combat, lied their way into a justification of violence. Pressured by a self-interested desire to conform to a socially acceptable image of what a veteran was imagined to be, their enthusiastic acceptance of the fiction of victimhood allowed them to escape from the difficult moral questions that their participation in the war had raised.

Lembcke makes sense of these compounded crimes as a consequence of the overriding need for a myth to explain defeat. He insists on the continuing need to make "the war itself...the issue, not the men who fought it.” This is consistent with his opposition to abstracting the soldier from the war, which is the charge he levels against the policy makers of the United States government. The problem with his alternative response is that it abstracts the war from the soldier, leaving no dimension of responsibility for what ensued. He does not adequately consider the possibility that many veterans became willing participants in the myth of victimhood as a way of dealing with the unbearable guilt they carried, and for which this system offered no other consolation.

His argument is not furthered by his deviation into criticism of films which portray the veteran as victim, but most of which were so marginal in their impact that he may have been the only person besides their makers to have actually seen them. And his discussions of the mythology of water, the particular association of women with spitting, and male fears of body fluids all suggest an academic expectation of synthesis without sense. But his singular contribution remains in the image of the defiled veteran as a trick of the state which continues to supply useful falsehoods for its ongoing crimes

New Pictures of Old Wars

[published March, 1999, The Catholic Worker]

Perhaps long years after the war was done, when each had built his defenses of lies which fitted his need...they could pretend to each other they were men. And avoid admitting they had once seen something animal within themselves that terrified them. - James Jones, The Thin Red Line

The film Saving Private Ryan, directed by Stephen Spielberg, has provoked much commentary about the experiences of World War II veterans, with the work being extolled as a statement which restores the status of the “good war.” But the movie is actually a deceitful exercise which creates new justifications for massive and indiscriminate slaughter. The almost intolerable realism of the violence in the scenes of the D-Day invasion should not be confused with a statement of opposition to that violence. Rather, it is an attempt to construct a new myth by which veterans can learn to bear the terrifying memories of their experience.

The opening scene shows an elderly man, trailed by what is apparently his family, walking among the graves of a military cemetery. A tight close-up of his face dissolves into the face of Tom Hanks, playing the role of an American officer on board a landing craft on D-Day, as if it were the elderly man’s memory. But this flourish of technique conceals a lie, contriving a conclusion to the film which is meant to shock the audience with the unexpected loss of one fictional character, erasing any horror over the carnage of real thousands. The screenplay mimics the traditions of most previous movies which have used this war as a subject. A patrol of stereotypes is sent out on a mission that few, if any, will survive. There is no innovation here: a humane captain, a wise and weary sergeant, a rebel against authority, a coward who will prove himself a hero, an Italian, a Jew. This dream of democracy lacks only an African-American who, because of the demands for historical accuracy, the segregated army of the 1940s makes impossible.

All very familiar, then except for the terrible inversion of the Christian story where, instead of one dying for all, all are slaughtered for one. e are left with King Arthur’s battlefield, the dead heaped up, nothing surviving but a story of praise for violence and a sword for future wars. This is what is now offered as a final gesture of gratitude to the soldiers aging around us.

Terence Malick’s film of The Thin Red Line is a more complicated, and interesting, failure to confront the reality of violence. This version of the war portrays nature as a participant, both victim and combatant. There is a terrible irony here, in that the world only becomes clear in the midst of violence; that the heightening of the senses which fear brings makes every detail of the landscape, seen and heard, more intensely real. The wind making its way across a field is as pronounced in the consciousness as any gunfire. When soldiers die, it is as if the earth swallows them up. And, at one point, armed men move through the fog firing into nothingness, making nature itself the enemy.

The film presents the war, here set on the Pacific island of Guadalcanal, as a kind of perverse liberation. “I killed a man, and nobody can touch me for it,” says one character, summarizing the moral abdication which war assumes. To care about the loss of lives, as one concerned officer discovers, is to be lost to one’s self. There is no place for such hesitation, and he is removed from his command.. While the film has been criticized for having too few carefully defined individual roles, that is consistent with a system which, according to one man, speaking out of his battle-induced madness with biblical clarity, treats its soldiers as “grass” to be cut down, as “dirt.”

One of the film’s final images is of another wave of landing craft heading for the beach, assuring the continuing cycle of destruction. But when the film asks the question, “This great evil...where did it come from?” it treats it as unanswerable, never suggesting the possible role of human freedom. One sergeant offers an explanation for the violence with the single word “property,” but the film treats the statement as an isolated outburst of conventional sarcasm. In the novel by the army veteran James Jones, upon which the film is based, that word is repeated over and over in a litany of the deepest conviction. The closest the film comes to resolving the question is in the voice of a dead Japanese soldier asking his killer, “Do you imagine your sufferings will be less because you loved goodness...truth?” But that insight is given no more precedence than another soldier’s contention that to care about nothing sounds like “a kind of bliss.” The survivors, the veterans, are left with the vague hope that that this experience means that the worst of their lives is over, while wondering about the true identities of those with whom they shared the horror. The film, finally, offers nothing but a sense of wonder that anything meaningful endures. But this is paradox, and not hope. The movie is a prelude of images to the discussion of nonviolence, but it ends where that discussion should begin.

As many struggle to preserve their sanity with the traditional lies of nationalism, what truths do we have to offer which would serve the same purpose? What is it that we, as nonviolent activists and believers, say to the veterans...our fathers, brothers, members of our own community? How many men,haunted by ghosts in VA hospitals around the country, have vanished from our view? Do we understand the silence that veterans keep about what they have seen and done? My own father’s summary of the situation as he waded ashore at Omaha Beach was condensed into the simple query, “What am I doing here?” This can be read as the ultimate moral question, and as a statement of deep skepticism about the rationalizations offered by the authorities who organized the horror.

How do nonviolent Christians counter the prevalent myth that our attitude toward veterans is marked by indifference, or worse, by disdain?Stories of soldiers returning from the war being spat upon by protesters are accepted as true because of an assumption, in this culture, that any call for repentance is necessarily vicious and humiliating. But, at the heart of the Christian gospel there is a truth about forgiveness and redemption that offers veterans a way to face the burdens of guilt and disbelief without having to depend upon what Wilfred Owen described as the “old lie” that there is glory in dying for one’s country. The men of our nonviolent communities, in particular, must have something to say to those definitions of manhood which are so essential to the murderous purposes of the state. There is no movie that will save us from using revisions of past violence to lend legitimacy to the violence we are still preparing. The nonviolent tradition can, however, offer reassurance that we are free not to cross the thin red line.

A Machine for Lying: Reflections on the Enola Gay

[published 1995, revised 2004,

Sometimes, what we inherit from our parents are lies, not so much malevolent as they are necessary fictions, devices meant to convince us that are lives have found justification in situations where we are deeply afraid that there is no justification available.

In the early summer of 1945, my father was in Germany, having survived the violence of war for over one year. I have heard only fragments of his life during that time – he would recount one or two comic interludes (a tent collapsing under the weight of a heavy rain, leaving him muffled in a muddy ditch) – but only rarely would other moments surface: the soldier crouching alone in the middle of an English field as the rest of his unit drove away in the dark; the line of corpses like a tide mark along a Normandy beach; the accidental slaughter recorded in the British voice over my father’s headphones, “You’ve shot down one of ours.” This is all by way of evidence that I can never know the terror my father learned, somehow, to live with during that time – the ways in which he had to strip his humanity away in order to keep himself from madness. So when the war ended in Europe it must have seemed to him a release beyond measure – while the word which came soon after, that he would be shipping out to the violence which continued in the Pacific – can only have come as a brutal betrayal.

Here, then, the histories of my father and the Enola Gay come together, as they do for many other veterans of that time, and for their children. The atomic explosion over Hiroshima became an image of salvation, a terrible parody of the Crucifixion, in which the dying of a city spared their lives. And the Enola Gay, the B-29 aircraft that dropped the bomb, was transformed into the icon of their escape, a machine not only for destruction, but for lying. The skillful technology of the plane and the bomb was read as evidence of their worthiness, and the degree of the slaughter was proportionate to the value of their survival.

But these soldiers,now veterans,were not unaware of the horror the bomb had caused,and as details of the destruction became gradually available, their need for a myth to explain them away became more and more desperate. Atrocities carried out by the Japanese were essential to this rationalizing, although these arguments never acknowledged their assumption that our actions were atrocities as well; and that, for all our assertions of moral superiority, we actually yearned to become our enemy, to become capable of the crimes our enemy committed.We had begun to measure the world in competing levels of terror, and the atomic bomb now meant that our terror could be absolute.*

These are not mere abstractions. They play themselves out in the realities of parents and children of that time – for if my father’s logic prevailed, then my survival, too, was linked to the incineration of vast numbers of human beings and the slow dying of many thousands more.In this version of the story, the Enola Gay carried me to safety. This is the unforgiving inheritance that the children of many World War II veterans (and their spouses – I think of my mother’s role as companion to my father’s need for the lie) find imposed on their experience of the past.

And so, outrage at the original proposal for the 1995 exhibition of the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian must be seen as an act of self-defense on the part of those veterans who are as yet unprepared to let the lie go. In order to preserve a fragile fiction of moral sanity, the veterans who believe what my father does could not tolerate any threat to their attempt at self-justification. And while the much reduced form of that first exhibition of sections of the plane –echoed in the current display of the aircraft intact – does not recount their version of history in any great detail, it still serves their purposes through its silence – the myth remains intact.

How would it be possible, then,to confront that myth in the only way that is really essential – to ask what it means to live out lives that we believe depend entirely upon our willingness to undertake, at this very moment, a act of nuclear genocide? Although the machines themselves have evolved into Trident ballistic missile submarines, the lie of the Enola Gay is unchanged, and the exhibition is complicit in it.

Museums like the ones devoted to Air and Space on the Mall in Washington, D.C. – and now in the recently opened Udvar -Hazy facility near Dulles Airport – are, in one sense at least, as great a threat as any of our current working armaments. While obsolete as a weapon, the Enola Gay retains its power to deceive. It has not been so much restored as recreated in the form of a storytelling mechanism which depicts the reality of total war as a glittering prop in a theatre meant to indoctrinate and reassure. When Kathy Boylan, Anne Quintano and I undertook a direct action at the Smithsonian on July 2, 1995, it was not our purpose to damage that object – that thing – known as the Enola Gay (although we were, of course, charged with just such a crime). It would have been pointless to mangle a machine that is not capable of functioning, but even though our gesture was symbolic, it had a real object. We were after the illusion of the Enola Gay with our blood and ashes; not to destroy the “property” which was the government’s controlling notion about its museum artifact, but to expose it as a self-justifying fabrication, and reveal, in some small way, the horrible reality it attempts to suppress.

When, at our trial, the state’s attorney used the word “desecrate” to describe what we had done to the airplane, he dramatically, if inadvertently, confirmed the necessity for our action. In an extraordinary perversion of the sacred, the machine that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima had been transformed into an object of worship, a relic of salvation through terror.

But where was the legal argument that would counter this idolatry? The necessity defense does not apply in the same way that it would for a plowshares action against a Minuteman missile silo – a working machine of the present moment. The Enola Gay is simply a lying story that helps this culture explain away the horrors it has committed in the past, while serving to give license for both our current willingness to commit nuclear genocide and our uncritical acceptance of the the claim that violence is inevitable in all human affairs.

And where in the constrained procedure of the court was there a place for arguments in defense of historical and moral truth? There have been suits successfully brought against revisionist historians who claimed that the Holocaust had not taken place. During our trial, Kathy Boylan described “the blood of the victims of Hiroshima finally reaching up to touch the plane,” but we were granted no legal formula that would acknowledge the voices of the dead as there is in Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashômon where a ghost testifies at a murder investigation.

We attempted to put the Smithsonian Institution itself on trial. What obligation does a museum have to present accurate information in its exhibits? Can it be held legally responsible for failing to do that? In the Holocaust Memorial Museum, visitors are confronted with the fatal indifference of the United States’ denial of asylum to Jewish refugees on board the ship St.Louis in 1939, and the later refusal to bomb the railways leading to Auschwitz because, according to a 1944 War Department letter, “it would not warrant the use of our resources.” Do the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki deserve any less of an acknowledgement from our collective conscience?

We argued that our action was meant to repair a display that was in a vandalized condition when we came to it, with its real history mutilated by censorship and fear.If there was any alteration in value to the plane as a result of what we did, it was in restoring its importance as evidence of a crime.Our hope was that the museum leave the plane permanently transformed as a way of acknowledging – finally – its own part in the conspiracy to keep us from the truth...and from repentance. That did not happen. But our action is a part of the Enola Gay’s history now, and brief as it was, the plane can never be quite the same again to those who witnessed its moment of exposure.

What right do we, or any, have to demand that this country confront the horrors of its own creating? What consolation can be offered to veterans like my father in return for abandoning the lie? Our acts of resistance are always, if not only, in the form of stories meant to bring people, not simply to their senses, but to their consciences. To tell the secret of the Enola Gay is to drain that machine of its power over us to accept it as an inevitability in our lives. And when the fatalism of violence is broken – then real salvation is possible.

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*This has its obvious contemporary parallels, most succinctly stated by John K. Stoner: “A country which has dangled the sword of nuclear holocaust over the world for half a century and claims that someone else invented terrorism is a country out of touch with reality.”